Kathryn Stockett

“I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.”

“Stuart stands and says, 'Come here,' and he's on my side of the room in one stride and he claps my hands to his hips and kisses my mouth like I am the drink he's been dying for all day and I've heard girls say it's like melting, that feeling. But I think it's like rising, growing even taller and seeing sights over a hedge, colors you've never seen before.”

“Never give up. The same manuscript may appeal to one agent and not to another. It's a matter of taste, and it's all about the writing.What if I had give up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?The point is, I can't tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won't take you anywhere.”

“It's so hot, Mister Dunn's rooster walks in my door and squats his red self right in front of my kitchen fan. I come in to find him looking at me like 'I ain't moving nowhere, lady”

“Today I'm on tell you bout a man from outer space." She just loves hearing about peoples from outer space. Her favorite show on the tee-vee is My Favorite Martian, I pull on my antennae hats I shaped last night out a tin foil, fasten em on our heads. One for her and one for me. We look like we a couple a crazy people in them things."One day, a wise Martian come down to Earth to teach us people a thing or two," I say."Martian? How big?""oh, he about six-two.""What's his name?""Martian Luther King."She take a deep breath and lean her head down on my shoulder. I feel her three-year-old heart racing against mine, flapping like butterflies on my white uniform."He was a real nice Martian, Mister King. Looked just like us, nose, mouth, hair up on his head, but sometime people looked at him funny and sometime, well, I guess sometime people was just downright mean."I coul get in a lot a trouble telling her these little stories, especially with Mister Leefolt. But Mae Mobley know these our "secret stories"."Why Aibee? Why was they so mean to him?" she ask."Cause he was green.”

“We go on in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. "Tell me bout the brown wrapping. And the present." She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up. That's her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my Piggly Wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like piece a candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole's Drug Store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside.”

“Once upon a time they was two girls," I say. "one girl had black skin, one girl had white."Mae Mobley look up at me. She listening."Little colored girl say to little white girl, 'How come your skin be so pale?' White girl say, 'I don't know. How come your skin be so black? What you think that mean?'"But neither one a them little girls knew. So little white girl say, 'Well, let's see. You got hair, I got hair.'"I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head."Little colored girl say 'I got a nose, you got a nose.'"I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me."Little white girl say, 'I got toes, you got toes.' And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can't get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on."'So we's the same. Just a different color', say that little colored girl. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. The End."Baby Girl just look at me. Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. Wasn't even no plot to it. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, "Tell it again.”

“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.”

“I set her on her wooden baby seat so her little hiney don't fall in and soon as I turn my back, she off that pot running.”

“She got a confused, disgusted look on her face, like she done salted her coffee instead a sugared it.”

“Only three things them ladies talk about: they kids, they clothes, and they friends. I hear the word Kennedy, I know they ain’t discussing no politic. They talking about what Miss Jackie done wore on the tee-vee.”

“She already got the blue dress on I ironed this morning, the one with sixty-five pleats on the waist, so tiny I got to squint through my glasses to iron. I don’t hate much in life, but me and that dress is not on good terms.”

“Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.”

“This woman talk like she from so deep in the country she got corn growing in her shoes.”

“If chocolate was a sound, it would've been Constantine's voice singing. If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.”

“But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”

“I never once heard her say she gone leave Leroy, and Minny don't say things twice. When she do things, they done the first time.”

“Mother calls up the stairs to ask what in the world I'm typing up there all day and I holler down, 'Just typing up some notes from the Bible study. Just writing down all the things I love about Jesus.”

“It's already 95 degrees outside. Mississippi got the most unorganized weather in the nation.”

“I intend to stay on her like hair on soap.”

“Week after Clyde left you I heard that Cocoa wake up to her cootchie spoilt like a rotten oyster. Didn't get better for three months. Bertrina she good friends with Cocoa She knows your prayer works.”

“Why don't we just build you an house outside Hilly?”

“She dumb.” I sigh. “But she ain’t stupid.”

“Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.”

“I'd cry, if only I had the time to do it.”

“I hear Raleigh's new accounting business isn't doing well. Maybe up in New York or somewhere it's a good thing, but in Jackson, Mississippi, people just don't care to do business with a rude, condescending asshole.”

“No, white women like to keep their hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches' fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gonna take they time with em.”

“I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine. Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. She is tall and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full-grown woman.”

“In the dark, I get a glimpse of myself from way above, like in a movie. I've become one of those people who prowl around at night in their cars. God, I am the town's Boo Radley, just like in To Kill a Mockingbird”

“Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.”

“Eres buena, eres lista, eres importante.”

“Cause that's the way prayer do. It's like electricity, it keeps things going.”

“If you in the morning Throw minutes away, you can't pick them up in the course of a day. You may hurry and scurry, and flurry and worry, you've lost them forever, forever and aye.”

“I don't know what to say to her. All I know is, I ain't saying it. And I know she ain't saying what she want a say either and it's a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation.”

“With other people, Hilly hands out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt, but it's our own silent agreement, this strict honesty, perhaps the one thing that has kept us friends”

“Womens, they ain't like men. A woman ain't gone beat you with a stick. Miss Hilly wouldn't pull no pistol on me. Miss Leefolt wouldn't come burn my house down. No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set of tools they use, sharp as witches' fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.”

“Rouva Charlotte Phelanin opas aviomiehenmetsästykseen, sääntö numero yksi: pienikokoinen, sievä tyttö korostakoon viehätysvoimaansa meikillä ja hyvällä ryhdillä. Pitkä ja ruma omalla rahastolla.”

“Valtakunnanuutisten osastossa on artikkeli uudesta lääkkeestä nimeltä Valium, "joka auttaa naisia selviytymään arkipäivän haasteista". Luoja, voisin ottaa kymmenen tuollaista pientä pilleriä juuri nyt. (Skeeter)”

“[Crisco] ain't just for frying. You ever get a sticky something stuck in your hair,like gum?...That's right, Crisco. Spread this on a baby's bottom, you won't even know what diaper rash is...shoot, I seen ladies rub it under they eyes and on they husband's scaly feet...Clean the goo from a price tag, take the squeak out a door hinge. Lights get cut off, stick a wick in it and burn it like a candle....And after all that, it'll still fry your chicken.”

“Ugly live upon the inside. Ugly be a hurtful mean person...Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision...You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?...With Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”

“For four days straights, I sit at my typewriter in my bedroom. Twenty of my typed pages, full of slashes and red-circled edits, become thirty-one in thick Strathmore white.”

“By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go….Miss Leefolt, she’d narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns”

“Baby Girl," I say. "I need you remember everything I told you. Do you remember what I told you?"She still crying steady, but the hiccups are gone. "To wipe my bottom good when I'm done?""No, baby, the other one. About who you are.”

“But Lou Anne, she understood the point of the book before she even read it. The one who was missing the point this time was me.”

“Mother says she doesn't need the medication anymore, that the only cure for cancer is having a daughter who won't cut her hair and wears dresses too high above the knee even on a Sunday, because how knows what tackiness I'd do to myself if she died.”

“Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you-she shakes her head, stares down at the scratched table-it's so good.”

“She hug me around my neck, say, "You're righter than Miss Taylor." I tear up then. My cup is spilling over. Those is new words to me.”

“What you learn today?" I ask even though she ain't in real school, just the pretend kind. Other day, when I ask her, she say, "Pilgrims. They came over and nothing would grow so they ate the Indians."Now knew them Pilgrims didn't eat no Indians. But that ain't the point.”

“I have decided not to die.”

“Here's to new beginnings," Stuart says and raises his bourbon.I nod, sort of wanting to tell him that all beginnings are new.”